Terry Eastland, publisher

TOD LINDBERG knew he had something big. Lindberg is editor of Policy Review, a publication of the Hoover Institution. More than a year ago, he had commissioned several articles on the subject of American power. The one Robert Kagan wrote caught his eye. "It was quite apparent on first reading that it was going to be huge," Lindberg says. "People were going to agree or disagree, but the article was going to shape debate."

"Power and Weakness," appearing in the June-July issue, drew notice throughout Europe. It was reprinted in every important European city, its themes taken up in learned conferences and symposiums across the continent.

Kagan, a senior associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a resident of Brussels, turned his 11,000-word essay into a book, which has just been published. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order is compelling reading, not least because it aids understanding as to why Europe and America are at odds over going to war against Iraq.

Kagan's basic argument is that American and European perspectives on "the all-important question of power"--its efficacy, morality and desirability--are diverging. The Europeans have moved "beyond power," as Kagan puts it, "into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation," a "post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity."

In history, or before paradise, of course, Europe used power, over and over. We Americans, Kagan says, are the ones who still live in history, an often nasty,

Kagan shows that "the trans-Atlantic divide" isn't momentary but has deep historical roots and is likely to endure. Europe experienced so much war on its own soil, including the great world wars, that it came to want no more of it. Defense budgets of European countries are tiny and declining--America's remains significantly higher--and the European Union, while economically a success, noticeably has failed to develop a military capacity. Europe has little ability to use force beyond its borders, while America can project power to all points on the globe.

In sum, Europe is weak, and America is strong. And each is that way not by accident but by design. Each, if you will, believes in being the way it is. And being what they are, Europe and America "measure risks and threats differently, define security differently and . . . have different levels of tolerance for insecurity."

Iraq is the current case in point. Being strong and therefore able to do something about it, Kagan writes, America is less willing to tolerate Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. But a weak Europe regards the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to be more tolerable than the risk of removing him. Europe would use peaceful means to try to bring him into the community of nations. Europe also would use the United Nations to try to constrain any American effort to use force against Iraq.